


first name terms

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: And Kylo Just Cannot, And Rey Just Will Not, F/M, Snow and Near Death Experiences Are a Good Place to Begin, The Other Knights of Ren are Total Pricks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-17 05:50:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5856586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I don’t need to be in your head to see what’s in your heart.</i>
</p><p>Cut down on the ice, Rey finds an unexpected ally.<br/>Looking to settle the score, Kylo gets an unexpected insight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	first name terms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SennaLaureen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SennaLaureen/gifts).



> You requested: Hurt/Comfort, preferably with Hurt!Rey.  
>  I wrote: Kylo Ren is Rey's biggest fan and will follow her until she loves him. Until that happens, however, he'll suffer through unanticipated humidity and presumably anticipated betrayal for the chance to fix her. 
> 
> Happy Valentine's Day! Never forget that it's not just a day for lovers, but a day for love.

“Get up!”

It comes out of the darkness, out of the mist.

“ _Get up!_ ”

Cold has never not played a supporting role in Rey’s daily life, but desert nights have nothing on the frigid ice planets her training and orders have found her visiting too many times lately. Her face feels flat, blank, frozen; her eyelashes are matted with clods of frosty grey. Head swirling with the fog and snow flurries of retreating unconsciousness, she struggles to raise herself up off the ground, grinding the heels of her hands into the slush. They slip and skid, and she goes down, renewed cold pecking at her like the beak of a monkey-lizard, ears screeching with wind and a natural klaxon labelled ‘concussion’.

She’d forgotten the voice when the hands haul her up, large and gloved, gripping the sopping fabric of her sleeves. There isn’t a part of her that isn’t drenched and freezing, but she’s long since stopped shaking. There’s no urge to fight the arms that lift her, despite her aversion to help, unsolicited physical contact, and commanding phantasms made of stained snow. That probably isn’t good. A Rey in her right mind would suspect none of this is ‘good’.

“Do you _want_ to die?” Furious, incredulous. Not human. Not _just_ human.

A lightsaber isn’t the only weapon which maims as well as killing. Though the slash across her back is courtesy of a blade formed of metal instead of light, it burns like a brand, uncauterised, ugly. They’ll be a scar she shouldn’t be vain about, not now. The smell of singed hair, the only beauty she’ll acknowledge she has, turns her stomach, filling her mouth with saliva, burning her throat with bile. Tears mingle with melted snow from her lashes. She’s exhausted. She’s half-asleep, half-alive, slowly being drained by insidious hypothermia, shock and pain. Death means quiet to her weakly fluttering brain, and that’s all it means.

“Yes,” she whispers.

Luckily, the universe is good at ignoring the wishes of children abandoned on Jakku, counting the days on the innards of an AT-AT.

He holds her hard against his chest, a small, stiff bundle of limbs and fading energy, engulfing her in the folds of his black cloak. As his mask and heavy robes keep him warm enough, the gesture is mitigated. He could of course use the Force to move her, but whatever part of him dreams also has a baseless belief that if he lets her float – if he lets her go, this girl,  _the_ girl – she’ll float away from him, the light inside her going somewhere no tracker can take him.

“No.” Kylo Ren’s single word is metallic, emotionless. Not stubborn –

Not  _just_ stubborn.

**.**

She reaches the island this time. At night, when she dreams it with her eyes open, she can never get close enough to explore the rocky green shore, but this time, she reaches it. In reaching it, she realises it’s no longer a dream. The endless craggy steps lead to Luke Skywalker, and she climbed them. The air tastes of sea and grass, blue and green, and she breathed it. The path has always been ahead of her.

Rey wakes abruptly, up to her shoulders in stinking but blessedly hot water, sinking down and coming up and gasping and cursing before she can even get to grips with her surroundings. It’s a cave, the stone grey and sheer rather than brown and porous like she’s used to, the floor worn to a sheen which reflects the gale-blasted ceiling. The shimmering heat in the air is so thick it verges on uncomfortable, and she’s uncomfortably damp, and sore, and still so weak that it’s the most she can do to note the colour of the rock and keep her chin from going under water.

Her boots are on.

Her blaster is missing.

“Why did you do it?” She asks.

“What, _not_ let you die?” Slightly too much for her is much too much for him. Sweat sticks black cowlicks of hair to his forehead, beads his face like dewdrops. He’s no more than a few feet away, utterly still, one arm braced across his knee. “Why _didn’t_ I do it is more accurate: kill you, when it would’ve been nothing to kill you.”

“Why?” The one syllable has a touch of teeth in it.

“I felt it,” he tells her coolly. “In the forest. When you defeated me.” Without gloves, his fingers are overly long, overly pale, and seem to Rey to have more than the usual number of joints as they flicker over the scar which bisects Kylo Ren’s absent expression. “You wanted to kill me, but you didn’t. You took more pleasure than you expected to from hurting me – more than you realised – but you stopped yourself. Even though I was defenceless. Even though the odds were, for once, on your side.” The fingers curl into a fist he doesn’t bother to hide from her. She’s becoming this world’s expert on his temper. “Now we’re even. Next time we meet, I’ll kill you with a clear conscience.”

The stickiness on her back indicates that the wound has stopped bleeding, but the raw edges are screaming in a way that blurs his outline and dims the lights. “That doesn’t explain,”  Rey says carefully, and then not carefully, "Why you dumped me in a superheated puddle.”

“Did you know it’s possible to track the currents which run beneath the earth? The hot ones specifically, if you know how.” He nudges a pebble with his toe but maintains perfect balance. She could know how he knows how to too, but forcing her way inside him isn’t  _her_ way. She has an idea, and it has something to do with a blast from a bowcaster which hit him in the side, not the throat. “I assumed you’d prefer being dumped in a superheated puddle to the alternatives, which were death, your stated preference, or having your clothes removed and being stuck with stim-shots by a creature in a mask.” Not threatening, not taunting – simply matter-of-fact.

She eyes him warily. “You know who cut me.”

“Yes.”

“You’re master of the Knights of Ren. He wouldn’t have been hunting me except on your orders.”

Perhaps his mouth contracts a little. Perhaps it doesn’t. Whether it does or not, he doesn’t blink. “You’re wrong. Jhoran Ren was…misguided. He thought killing you would win him favour with Supreme Leader Snoke, maybe even enough favour to replace me. He was wrong too.” A pause. “I’ll deal with him when I’m done with you.”

“You’re going to kill him,” she accuses.

“Yes,” he replies.

Rey shifts in the water which feels like blood, unable to be easy around someone who sickens her as much as he does. Crouching in this cave is the murderer of Han Solo, Lor San Tekka, countless others. He’s Finn’s enemy, Poe’s tormenter, a monster, a breathing black hole.

He’s Ben Solo.

So when she speaks, she speaks slowly.

“Ren is the name of your order, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Meaning Kylo is a first name.”

“An identifier, yes.” He sits back on his haunches, neck flushed red from the heat. “It means something.”

“I think it sounds like something.” She presses her spine against the rock, trying to keep herself upright; a universe of stars goes spinning past, and Rey flounders even in such shallow water. She swallows a sulphurous mouthful, coughs it back up again. “I think,” she goes on. “It sounds like Solo.”

Whatever reaction she hoped for, he doesn’t oblige. “Is there a point to what you think?” Their eyes are similar in colour, but his are long and narrow and set precisely above the other long, narrow, otherwise unremarkable features of his face. Her eyes are just eyes, but he finds them and holds them no matter where she directs her gaze.

“Using the right form of address is a fundamental building block of society in most civilised systems.”

His head slides over to one side. Her contempt is, apparently, amusing. “You’re asking if you can call me Kylo.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to dump me in a superheated puddle if I were on fire.”

A possibility flits around the left-hand corner of his lips, but disappears before Rey can convince herself it was ever really there –

Good.

It’s better not to believe that a monster and a murderer could smile like that.

**.**

“The ship belonging to Jessika Pava is that way. She didn’t bring a gunner, you can leave the planet with her.” They’d look strange to their respective factions now. They look strange to each other, marching stubbornly and near silently through the wilderness, the sky behind them a crackling lilac, the sun too bright even to squint at. Rey had brought goggles with her against snow blindness, but lost them when Jhoran Ren swung at her with his single-edged blade, slicing her pack rather than her skin.

“You know about Jess?”

“I know about everything.”

She stops, turning her back on the path which leads to her friend, to rations, to a proper medkit instead of the clumsy strapping which makes it difficult to breathe the pure, thin air of the planet _Kylo Ren_ is suggesting she leaves with Jessika Pava. “If you know so much, then you know your mother would still do anything to get you back.” The words twist in her mouth, prick at her eyes. “You know you could have everything,” she finishes bitterly.

“It does seem like everything to you, doesn’t it?”

“Get out of my head.”

“I don’t need to be in your head to see what’s in your heart.”

They stand a short distance from one another, the flat front of the mask giving her only slightly less than his real face would. Still, she feels him: the shape of him under there, the pull of his shoulders, the rise of his chest. She sometimes flits inside him by accident, only coming to with a sense of disgust that puts her off dinner when she goes to pick something up and the choice doesn’t belong to her, and nor does the object, and nor do the hands. It’s how she learns how desensitised he’s become to Snoke, to the constant mental invasion that is required of a dark apprentice, and more so of an apprentice blighted with goodness from birth.

“It isn’t just me,” Rey challenges him quietly. “Is it?”

“No,” Kylo Ren answers, almost before she concludes the thought. “It isn’t just you.” She takes such joy in things, that’s the problem. He’s convinced himself that if she didn’t, losing himself inside her wouldn’t now be as much a part of his daily meditations as the twisted, melted mass that was once his grandfather’s face. There’s no price high enough for such uncomplicated happiness –

There’s no price he wouldn’t pay.

As if by agreement, they turn and walk away from each other, crunching through the drifts, him striding, her limping. It would be foolish to watch her go, he decides.

He sees her safe through her own eyes, and hates himself.


End file.
